Strong Questionnaire = Strong Game Plan

May 1st, 2008
Every year, thousands of organizations across North America conduct employee and customer surveys. Each company has their own reason for engaging in the survey process, but regardless of the reason, every company has one goal in mind; and that is to use the data produced by the survey to their benefit.

For any organization to fully benefit from the survey process, two conditions must be met, (1) a carefully crafted questionnaire has to be constructed to obtain the required information to satisfy the objectives of the survey and (2) different analysis techniques must be completed in order to return useful data.


Questionnaire Design

The purpose of the questionnaire is to obtain the most meaningful feedback possible from your respondents. To receive maximum value from a survey questionnaire, each question should be constructed with a specific purpose in mind. They must be structured to eliminate confusion and influence respondents to be receptive in providing honest and meaningful feedback.

Constructing a good survey questionnaire can sometimes be a difficult task since the process reaches far beyond making a laundry list of random questions.

Far too often organizations enter the survey process using an inadequate questionnaire. The truth of the matter is that data analysis goes far beyond analyzing each question individually. The questionnaire has to be structured so survey questions feed off of each other to assist data analysis. Successful football teams have a good game plan and can execute it with a high degree of efficiency. In the survey process, the questionnaire is your game plan and the data analysis is the execution. Without a good questionnaire as your base, data analysis will often fall short.


Data Analysis

A common data analysis technique is called as Cross Tabulation. It is the process of analyzing multiple questions simultaneously; and this cannot be successfully accomplished without careful consideration in your questionnaire design. Cross Tabulation provides additional insight and drills down into the survey statistics to identify possible root causes that are producing particular responses.

Example; it would be an interesting statistic to read that 23.6% of your employees are unhappy with a certain aspect of their work environment or that 23.6% of your customers were not totally satisfied with your products or services.

Cross Tabulation focuses on the 23.6% to see how those specific individual respondents answered other questions in the survey in an attempt to discover common themes (i.e. root causes) shared between those unhappy individuals.

Survey responses are deliberate and occur for a reason, whether a response is positive or negative in nature. An inadequate survey questionnaire will identify areas of concern in specific areas, but a carefully crafted questionnaire will foster strong data analysis and attempt to uncover possible root causes of why those areas are of concern.

Survey Data Stream

Cameron Eastman,
President